


No worse fortune

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Counterfactual, M/M, Major Character Injury, Medical Procedures, Past Domestic Violence, Women Being Awesome, crossover character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things go badly for King Henry at the Battle of Shrewsbury, and two fugitives, one seriously injured, seek sanctuary at a priory nearby.</p><p>To shinobi93's prompt for 'anything Hal/Poins.'</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: in addition to the tags, some moderately detailed description of facial injury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No worse fortune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shinobi93](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinobi93/gifts).



The two men arrived on foot at the priory just after Compline on St Apollinaris’s day.  Almost twenty miles east of the field and several off the main thoroughfares, the canonesses did not expect to encounter much of its direct aftermath.  Here, though, was aftermath embodied bloodily and awkwardly: both were young, from their dress and manner of speech gentlemen, one was rather the social superior of the other, that former was badly wounded, and neither wore any clue as to identity.  All that the White Ladies could guess was that they must perforce belong to the losing side.

Sister Eleanor received the wounded man into her empty infirmary. The chaplain, fussy but lazy, assured himself that extreme unction would not be required and departed with the injunction to send for him if the youth expressed a desire to confess himself.  Eleanor forbore sarcastic comment on the incompatibility of facial injury and penitential discourse, upon which exercise of her last firm purpose of amendment she permitted herself a small self-congratulation.  She did not see the other man.  Apparently insensible with fatigue but no more than cut and bruised, he had been accommodated in the prioress’s house.  

The infirmarian stood an inch under six foot (it had not made her secular life particularly jolly, but in a female religious of distinct opinion and forceful personality statuesque appearance was something of an advantage) and this young man was at least four inches taller than her, but lankily immature. She put his age at less than twenty years, perhaps a deal younger.  He was just about conscious, but delirious with pain.  Eleanor seated the young man on one of the infirmary cots and unwound the dressing on his head.  

She thought she could see what had happened.  An arrow had entered his face just to the left of his nose, and there was no exit wound.  His cheek was torn away: she could see the teeth in his jaw beneath the twitching, blood-black flesh. A field surgeon, to whom he owed his life, because the injury had been flushed with enough vinegar that Eleanor could smell it still, and the bandage made as secure as she might herself have done, must have successfully removed the shaft, but the bodkin tip—the entry wound was too small for it to have been any other kind—was still inside his head. It would have to come out, and that would probably kill him, but if it stayed there it would certainly do so.  Still, it was a miracle that he was alive.  A miracle.  

‘God help me,’ she whispered.  She was charged with a sacred duty to which she could scarcely believe herself equal.  But no, a loving God did not torment his children with trials they could not bear.  Her first determination was not to fail him.

She cleaned his face with more vinegar and and a little honey, examining it as she did. The young man shuddered and whimpered, but obeyed her injunction not to speak or scream.  Eleanor, who did not waste admiration, noted the stoicism.  The arrowhead was buried beyond the reach of any instrument she possessed: she would have to have something made, and in the meantime the wound must not close.   That was not going to be pleasant; she must sedate him, she supposed, but Eleanor did not approve of sedation; it was too easy for the patient to die unconscious and in mortal sin; it was unlikely that a man direct from the field was in a state of grace.  She dressed it lightly; when there was more light, she would undertake the disagreeable business of opening and holding open.

She wondered if he could take food or drink, managed to pour a little water into his mouth at the cost of only another sharp shiver.  She would try him with beef broth later.  Eleanor approved of beef broth.  The light was all but gone. The other sisters would have retired by now.  She lit a branch of candles and sent her servant to the stores for linen.  There might be some articles of masculine attire there; the community’s charitable activities were, to Eleanor’s mind, insufficient, but they did distribute some clothes to the poor.  But there was probably nothing to fit him, for any meaning of fit. He had lost or ditched some of his armour, but what remained was very fine.  If the victors knew that he had got off the field alive, they were looking for him. She put that out of her head and focussed on the matter at hand. Uncasing a knight fell outside the range of Eleanor’s experience of life, which was otherwise not inconsiderable.  His head drooped. She tilted his chin as gently as she could and looked into a face that had until the day before yesterday been appealing, if never exactly handsome: nose too long and pointed, a hanging underlip in a ponderous jaw.  He was clammy and pale with agony and his light brown eyes were filmy, but they focussed on hers.

‘You’ll have to show me how to get you out of this, sir, at least where to start.’

He tried to smile; spewed up the recently-administered water, along with some blood and bile, onto Eleanor’s placket front.  He looked distressed; so, the small indignities of ill-health were new to him.

‘ _Don’t try to talk_.  Just point me.’  She smiled herself. ‘No pun intended.’  

Eleanor had a gift for seeing the mechanics of the things around her, and the mechanics of attaching armour to a man’s person was ingenious and pleasing.  The effort of showing her how it was detached again took the youth’s remaining energy; his eyes closed and he slumped.  

She had unlaced his arming doublet—of course, they didn’t wear shirts under those heavy padded things, no use in further bulk—before the indelicacy of the situation broke upon her.  Eleanor had been married; she had borne a child, christened Anne for the late queen. The baby lived two days.  But men’s bodies had never interested her, except insofar as she could heal them.

Joan returned with a pile of linen.  She smiled at the sight of austere Sister Eleanor with a half-naked young man across her knees.  Joan had been born deaf, but so had many people in her small border village.  She spoke as they did, with her hands, and she had taught Eleanor to do it too.  The infirmarian found silence was useful often, and restful the remainder of the time.

Joan dropped the bundle.  Together they got him out of the filthy, sweat- and blood-stained doublet, peeled off his hose, and laid him down.

‘He’s a fine big lad, isn’t he? Such a shame. Nothing that’ll even come close.  Sorry.’

‘Oh well, he can have a shift of mine.  He won’t be getting up for a bit.’

‘Or—’ Joan’s hands froze, and then moved quickly. ‘When I came in, you looked like—’ it struck Joan that she was about to say something embarrassing and perhaps blasphemous, ‘—you needed help.’

‘I did.  But he’s going to live.‘ Eleanor struggled find the sign for what she wanted to say; fell back on inane simplicity, which told her she had been scanting Joan’s religious, or Joan her linguistic instruction, but that was for another day.  ‘God told me.  I just don’t know how we’re going to do it.’

Eleanor believed in (in roughly ascending order), wholesome plain food, pleasant smells, prayer, astringents, and cleanliness.  Her next determination was to keep the lad out of the hands of the infirmarian at St Leonard’s, who believed in bleeding, purging and nostrums of ammoniac character. It was not that Eleanor presumed to think her methods were better than those of a trained physician, it was just that fewer people died under her care, and more important, those who did made better deaths.  

She was glad the lad had passed out; it meant she didn’t have to deal with pain or prudery as she washed him, and she could plan something.  It was delicate.  The whole priory probably knew of the man’s—men’s—existence by now, and news would spread. She left him in Joan’s reliable hands.  Febrile and dangerous mutterings as to his identity or role in the fighting, unless this fine tall lord was able to convey them in the sign language of a remote marches settlement that was really an extended family, would thus go happily unnoticed and unreported.  Meanwhile Eleanor could deal with the prioress, who was, typical of her class, a somewhat weak-minded woman, mildly dissipated and largely incompetent. The dissipation meant that Madame Eglantine would still be awake; the incompetence that it would be a tiresome interview. Eleanor was untroubled by carnal desires and derived pleasure from frugality, but her vow of obedience was a torment.

She had a sort of a plan by the time she reached the parlour.  It wasn’t a good one. She knocked, was admitted and found Madame Eglantine entertaining the other young man _._   She bobbed to the prioress, turned to pay a courtesy to the gentleman.

‘May I present Henry Gadshill? Sister Eleanor, our infirmarian.’ 

Oh, heavens, Eleanor thought, she was tipsy.  And enamoured.  Gadshill was, even to Eleanor’s uninterested mind, an attractive man, more so for an easy manner than a fair face.  He was slighter, shorter and older than his companion, though still as tall as Eleanor and fully thirty years Eglantine’s junior. He inhabited the plain serviceable clothes that had been found for him with grace, though the rough material was humiliation to a gentleman.  And then she saw him truly, saw through a fortnight’s beard and over a decade’s separation.  Her vision went black, but she kept her feet. He couldn’t be, but he was.

She swallowed dryly.  ‘How do you do, sir?  Your—the knight who came here with you—I have managed to make him tolerably comfortable, but his situation is very grave, and I must return to him as soon as I may.  Madam Prioress, I must beg leave of an interview with you, not now, of course, the hour is late, I have left my patient with Joan, but before Nocturne, yes, a matter of some urgency concerning—well, concerning.’

‘Your gentlemen callers?’ put in Gadshill, unhelpfully.  Eleven years fending for himself hadn’t taught him any tact.  Well, it wouldn’t have done, would it? His unfamiliar man’s voice flooded her with guilt.  _Imbecile_ boy—she would have sorted it out, was sorting, when he—if he had only waited a few weeks—

Eleanor smiled tightly. ‘And other business concerning the health of the community, sir.’  Seeing Madame Eglantine pout, she snapped, ‘It absolutely _can’t_ wait, my lady.’  Tact maybe wasn’t a family characteristic, Eleanor reflected wryly.

‘Very well.  Charis—’ the prioress said to her maid, who was sitting in a corner suppressing yawns and fussing the prioress’s lapdog. ‘You will see I rise well before Nocturne to see Sister Eleanor here.’

Eleanor thought this would be insufficient precaution, but was glad to be able to quit them; almost too overwhelmed to speak her goodnights, she fled back to the infirmary.

Joan said he’d woken and she’d managed to get him to take a mild sleeping draught.  Eleanor had just settled to her night’s watch when she heard a rattle on the shutter in the dispensary cubby at the other end of the infirmary.  She released the catch and opened it a chink.  Gadshill grinned up at her, lounging with his arms folded on the sill.

‘Jesu.’ 

‘Open up.’  She turned for the door; he caught the shutter, pushed it open and vaulted in at the window, nimble and quiet as a stoat. 

‘Ned,’ she said reprovingly, going to close it again. 

‘Do I get a kiss off my long-lost sister, Sister?’

‘I’m not meant to—’  Eleanor thought of all the things she had done that she was not meant to since the last note of Compline had sounded that evening, possibly including high treason (though surely it couldn’t be, if inadvertent) and reckoned that accepting an embrace from a blood relative she hadn’t seen since good Queen Anne was alive was the least of it. She had not been in a man’s arms since—well, some time before her husband died. He was already old when they married, weak and slack.  Her brother was breathtakingly strong, all sinew.  His hug lifted her off her feet. 

She took refuge in her old role of little nurse.  ‘I thought you were—you have a lot of explaining to do, my boy.’

‘You can talk. Your mother-whatsit was just about to jump my unworthy carcass when you tumbled in. I recognised you straight away _._ I knew you were here, anyway,’ he finished complacently.

‘You knew how—anyway, you’ve changed more, you were only fourteen, you foolish, foolish—look at you now, a _man_ —a _soldier_ —she’s not—by the way, mother—it isn’t an abbey.  Look, did you _really_ have to debauch my prioress? It makes things difficult.’  

‘I’ve never dishonoured a woman in all my life, on our mother’s soul.  I was _fighting_ her off, and her lousy bastard sack.  Look, I’m as sober as—as the Lord Chief Justice, which I’m not very often, I’ll admit that much. I only took small ale.’

‘What did you tell her?  I need to know.’

‘Nothing. False name, as you heard.  She didn’t even ask about H—him.  Mercifully incurious about everything except the contents of my kecks.’

‘Ned, for shame.’

‘’s only the truth.  You must know what she’s like.  How is he _really_?’

‘Frankly, it’s awful, and bloody and terrible, but I might be able to do something. I have an idea. Who is he?’

‘Honestly, Nell, you think I’m going to say?’

‘Oh, so it is like that. I rather suspected.  Can you say how much like that it is?’

‘No, otherwise you’d know, wouldn’t you, my idiot sister?  It’s for your own good. I wouldn’t put you in _serious_ danger, I swear—I wouldn’t have come at all, only that he was in a bad way.  May—may I see him now?’

‘Of course. Through here. I didn’t know you were well-acquainted. Do you serve him, Ned?’

‘No—yes. Sort of.  Not in so many words. It’s complicated.’

Eleanor frowned.  ‘I’d be relieved if you did.  I thought you must have gone for—for a soldier of fortune.’

‘Don’t be picturesque, sis.  The word is _mercenary,_ if you want to be polite.  But I’m not for hire any more.  At least, I wasn’t.’

They reached the bedside.  Eleanor, suddenly exhausted, turned to go. ‘Will you watch him an hour then? I’ve a few things to gather together for tomorrow.  I’ll try to catch a bit of sleep.  I’ll get Joan to come in and take over—it’s all right, she can’t help but be—discreet—Ned? Ned?’

Her brother was on his knees at his lord’s bedside, doing the thing that perhaps only half a dozen people alive, Eleanor among them, would recognise as _Ned weeping_ , a harsh furious hiccup that had replaced infantile wail when he was four years of age.

Joan found him curled like a cat on the couple of square foot of bed not occupied by his companion’s sprawled limbs.  She thought it would probably do the lad the world of good to have some human warmth about him, and better his squire than anyone else in this place, but she sensed that this view would not be shared by the infirmarian, who would say brisk things about impure air.  Still, Eleanor would likely accompany the prioress to the midnight office, and wouldn’t be back for an hour or so yet. She left him sleep until she saw the eleven white robes filing out of the chapel, ghosts in their shrouds, then shook his shoulder. He twitched and woke without bleariness, turning on her a mischievous smile.  God’s bones, there was a bit of all right—but you could bet he knew it, too, she’d seen his type, easy come, easy go.  But mostly go.  He was fond of that boy, mind; he bent and brushed the lad’s one whole cheek with a touch light and sweet as small rain, raised his fingertips to his own lips, which moved in aspiration; made the sign of the cross. The wounded youth whimpered but didn’t come round. 

*

Rather to Eleanor’s surprise, the prioress was awake and alert.  Her nasty little dog frisked at the hem of Eleanor’s habit: Eleanor liked dogs, but she liked them to _be_ dogs, loping lymers or tidy whippet brachs, not something that resembled a sluttish butcherwife’s unrinsed mop animated by a thousand demons of spite.  She tried to shift it with her toe without actually kicking it; it flung itself at her ankle with a growl.  Charis clucked an admonishment that seemed directed more at Eleanor than the beast, and scooped it into her apron.

‘Until we know more, Prioress, I think silence is best. We’ve done no more than exercise charity, as we are bound. Nonetheless, whichever way the battle went, it’s very likely that these men are now political undesirables—’

‘I don’t think it’s his real name.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Gad’s Hill is in Kent. Did he sound like a Kentishman to you?’

The prioress gestured in the the direction of the guest chamber, which she clearly did not know was empty.  Oh, goodness, _Ned_.  He must have climbed out of the window on top of everything else.

‘I couldn’t place his accent, Prioress. I think he has travelled considerably, possibly in the character of a—’ childishly, she sought the most euphemistic description she could, ‘an adventurer.  In any case, a false name here or there is not, beg your pardon, to the purpose—’

‘It’s a bit like your accent, Sister, actually. Where are you from again?’  Was she just infatuated, Eleanor wondered, shuddering even at that more reassuring explanation, or did she suspect something?  Did Ned resemble her?  They shared chestnut-coloured hair, but the prioress couldn’t see that on her, their four eyes were ordinary puddle-brown, that surely could signify nothing, and they both had their father’s nose, a member called aquiline in its masculine iteration and in its feminine hag-like.  Otherwise she scarcely knew what she looked like after five years with no glass save the occasional inadvertent glimpse in the duckpond.    

‘Near Tewkesbury, ma’am—I think he could be a Gloucestershire man, yes, perhaps there is a Gad’s Hill there too—but equally—really—his companion is my concern—without immediate attention he is likely to die.  May I ask your leave to be excused the hours after Matins? I think, with God’s help, madam, he can be saved—’

‘Should he not be placed under the care of a physician, Eleanor? He is a man of birth, I believe?’

‘He wouldn’t survive a journey, ma’am, and I think were we to send to St Leonard’s even that day’s delay could be fatal.’  Had Eleanor been minded to examine her soul at that moment she would perhaps have found it stained by untruthfulness as well as obstinacy, for she simply did not know what the young man’s constitution could bear, only that it was formidable.  But so was the wound.  In any case, her obstinacy (which was native) meant that for the moment, damnation seemed like an acceptable risk to run to keep him out of the way of that fearful piss-and-wind merchant at the friary.  

Madame Eglantine didn’t look happy.  ‘Perhaps—you might try what you have in mind, and we could send for Brother Martin—’

‘No! I’m sorry, ma’am, I mean, drawing attention to his presence here could bring considerable hazard upon the community.  When we know the outcome of the—dissension, of course, the situation may change.  We may be obliged to render them up to some secular authority.  But we should not, I think, seek to do so, to meddle in worldly affairs. Our best protection is our innocence.’

‘Whichever way it went, Eleanor, they lost.  They’re a liability.’  

Blast, thought Eleanor, why did the wretched woman always have to turn perspicacious and pragmatic on her when she was trying to get something done?

‘He’s—they’re Christian souls, prioress.  We can’t throw them out on the road—not the injured man, anyway.  Gadshill might leave any time, of course.’  Feeble as it sounded, it was the right thing to say.  The guff about calm and reflective deathbeds that Eleanor had rehearsed to play on the morass of sentimentality that the prioress confused with piety was nothing to it.  The old bat was avid for Ned’s company; Eleanor’s gorge filled with eleven years of protective bile.  Don’t be so fond, she told herself.  Ned’s a—she had only meant to think _grown man_ , but the truth of what he did, what he had become, what he _was,_ surged in on her, and it was all her fault.  

‘ Yes, we have our duty. _Haec maior autem his est caritas_. You may treat your patient as you see fit, Sister, and we will await developments.’

Eleanor had got exactly what she wanted, and it felt _horrible_.

She went sick to the night office, the prioress twittering oblivious at oxter-height. The psalms and antiphons eddied bootlessly around her troubled mind.  What campaigns had there been? There was much less fighting in France these days, but then there had been King Richard’s Irish adventures—but, _mercenary._ He fought for whoever paid, or rather, offered most in plunder.  He could have gone anywhere, from here to Egypt.  No wonder she hadn’t been able to find him.  Her stomach lurched: because they shared blood, because she’d spent eight years after their father’s death putting herself between Ned and another beating from their elder brother Maurice, because her nerve had sometimes failed her and she’d let him be thrashed rather than take more blows herself, because of the cuts she’d bathed in wine, the bruises she’d soothed with wolfsbane, the ribs she’d bandaged, the slings she’d torn out of the ruins of their linen, because she’d accepted Hugh Rigby’s unappetising proposal to escape Maurice’s drunken melancholia, his violence and the wretched mortgaged unyielding estate, because she’d promised, _sworn_ , the minute she was settled and could persuade the crotchety old burgess that her brother would earn more than he cost to feed she’d send for him, because that hadn’t been easy, as Ned, being a fourteen-year-old boy, ate like a fourteen-year-old boy and yet was all too obviously ignorant, half-feral with neglect, and had never generated any income beyond the occasional fourpence he won at quoits, because when she finally had ground her husband down, and sent, the servant returned with the news that Master Edward had been missing these three weeks and Sir Maurice hadn’t been out of bed since, let alone done anything to look for the child he blamed for killing his beloved mother; because Hugh had been unexpectedly sympathetic and let her spend quite a lot of his money and their servants’ time searching, but all the clues had come to nothing, yes, because of all that, and sheer thoughtlessness, she’d unleashed on her priory a hireling killer who served a traitor or no-one ( _it’s complicated,_ quotha), experienced sobriety as a novelty, thought nothing of climbing out of windows in his hostess’s house at midnight, could when bruised and tired still vault five feet into a window as easily and silently as stepping over a wisp of straw and swing his portly sister off her feet in a casual embrace.  And who was a fugitive from whatever the civil authority was supposed to be now.  Well, that was one fine evening’s work, Nell my girl. 

But there were oddities too.  The tears—well, brutes were often maudlin— Maurice was soppy over horses and cheap songs, his violence more often than not followed by lachrymose apology.  _I’m not for hire any more_ —that might only be that he thought he’d found a place with that young lord, who was now dispossessed at best.  _Never dishonoured a woman in all my life_ was exactly the sort of hyperbole you _would_ hear out of a rapist, except the unnecessary oath that had followed it—Ned had learned early, for fairly obvious reasons, never as much to mention Mama, let alone swear on the memory of her he did not have.  It was no good.  Even if he wasn’t given to taking women by force, it was only because he didn’t have to.  There were plenty who would dishonour themselves for a well-turned leg in close-fitting boots and a frank, naughty smile.  These were surely the last days, corruption, irreligion, luxury and Lollardy everywhere you looked (Eleanor, though a loyal daughter of the Church, sometimes reflected privately that orthodoxy might not be so very quick to justify the heretics’ complaints against it), masterless men on the roads and harlots in the cloister.  The moral fortifications of her little haven were precarious at best, and Edward Poins was a bombard.

*

‘Ned, you’re in my _light_.  And you shouldn’t be here at all, actually.  You’re the prioress’s guest.’

‘Quite.  Like facing Dulle Griet, except _she_ only fires twice a day.  That’s beautiful, that.  Does the little windlass draw back the—I see. You were always good at designing engines. Gentle birth was wasted on you.’

‘At least I didn’t waste _it_ ,’ she said tartly, and softened, ‘You’d be too, if you had any patience.’

‘Me? I can cling onto the back of any brute you care to mention and sling my ring over anyone’s pole and _that is all.’_  

Eleanor frowned.  Like many people who dislike bawdy, she was quick to hear it and thought it should at least be _precise_. 

‘—and some sleight of hand tricks that wouldn’t become me if I hadn’t turned round and shat in my mess of birthright.’

‘Edward, really.’

‘You said it.  I just added a figure of speech.’

He had a way of being undeniable. She changed the subject.

'Thank you, for helping me with him earlier. It wasn't pleasant.'  This was something of an understatement.  Ned had held his head as she cleaned and re-opened the wound, held it open with wads of gauze wrapped around sticks and dipped in in turpentine, honey and vinegar.  Afterwards he had sat with him, murmuring, holding the boy’s big clammy hand, until the sedative Nell had reluctantly administered took effect.  She must, she thought, get the chaplain to him: the risk of his being recognised must be run: the body’s life could not be counted above that of his immortal soul. She would make sure that the bandages were particularly copious.

Ned shrugged.  ’Seen worse.’

'You'd be surprised.  It's a different sort of strong stomach than the one you need to maim and kill.'

'Not on the field, though that can be nasty enough.  In Algeciras. There was nothing for us to do, but our captain was milking it, stringing out the contract, you know. I—er—lodged with a physician for a bit. It was interesting.’ 

Something told Eleanor the man hadn’t been a Christian, and she pursed her lips.

‘Here,’ she said, finishing her drawing and folding it.  Take the prioress’s palfrey—I have her permission, of course—’

‘Pity.’

‘Ned. Don’t pretend you’re any sort of horse thief; I remember a very torrid afternoon talking Sir Thomas Lucy out of pressing charges even if no-one else does, and it’s not big or clever to rely on a feeble woman to spring you from a scrape. You’ll find the beast quite lively: might be a little small, but my lady prioress is a huntswoman, and she knows horseflesh. The forge is on the road due south, you can’t miss it.  The blacksmith knows me; he’s worked to my instructions before, and the priory has an account.  Don’t let him persuade you to give him hard cash, under any circumstances.  He likes to drink: we pay his wife.’

When her brother had departed she went to sit and pray with the young man.  She addressed her devotions to Our Lady, on the pattern revealed to St Dominic; and to St Sebastian, as patron saint of archers.  She was about to call Joan to relieve her in time for sung mass at Sext, when the boy stirred and murmured.  His eyes opened suddenly, and fixed on hers, bleary but lucid.

‘Ned,’ he mumbled, ‘Ned.’

‘Ned’s running an errand for me, sir.  He’ll be back—anon, and I’m sure he’ll want to see you. My name is Sister Eleanor.’

‘Ned,’ he insisted.  ‘Woss it—y’head.‘  He raised his hand and flapped it around his ear. He thought she _was_ her brother, he realised; they must look very much alike.  She trusted again in the prioress’s lack of perspicacity.

‘Don’t try to talk.  You’ll hurt yourself.’  But the sedative had temporarily inured him, and he was of a social station to which obedience did not come easily.

‘Don—f—in—tell—y—f—in—prins—wot—do—Poin.’

‘Sir. I’m not Ned.  I’m his sister, a canoness of St Augustine. My name is—’ childhood intimacy made a clamorous appeal, ‘my name’s Nell.  You’re safe, sir, for the time being.’

‘M—gon—die—Poi?—gon—di?

‘No, sir. God has preserved you to do his will.’

‘Die—in—m’boot—y’boos—smoo—f—cker—’

‘You’ll die as and when God ordains, sir.  But by his grace and mercy, not yet.’

‘Stoo—jum—ju—stool—’

‘All right.’  She was surprised—she had seen to this already that morning, and he had been able to take very little drink or nourishment.  She went to fetch a bedpan, but when she returned he snorted wheezily and shook his head.

‘N—that—m—awrgh—’

‘Very well, sir.  Let me know if you do. Just point. Don’t talk.’

‘Ned—Remmemmer—when—yeat—m—cannl—enn. M—f—in—con—con—’

‘To confess, yes, sir.  I’ll fetch the chaplain to you after he has said Mass.  Please try to be quiet.’

‘No—f—in—prees. Tel—m—story—Ned.’ 

She judged it no harm, and it would certainly do him good to listen rather than speaking, so she told ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead.’

‘S' all righ—bit—dis—cree.’

Perhaps you should try to sleep, sir.’

‘Yes—wi—wi—Wan—you, Ned. Suc—m’congeal—f—in—fen—eel—coc—’

Eleanor clasped his hand. ‘Please be calm.’

‘F—in—flap-dragons,’  he said quite distinctly. He must be wholly delirious, she considered.

Don—wan—die. Not—fore—y’ve—riddn—me—gain. Die—happ—lees.’

‘You’ll ride again, sir, God willing. Calm yourself,’ she soothed, pressing his hand.

‘Fussakes. Ne—n—usely—so— _coy_.’

With the one of those accesses of strength and determination peculiar to invalidity, he reversed the position of their hands, and, enveloping hers, placed it firmly where the hand of no woman in religious life should venture.  It was strange to feel the thing which she had rejoiced she should never have to touch again, hard despite the drug she had administered (well, he was _very_ young) and through the linen of her one of her own shifts to boot.  Sedatives not uncommonly had such disinhibiting effects, she thought, fighting repulsion; it was another reason not to employ them.  It was progress of a sort anyway—at least he now recognised that she was a woman.  She tried to pull back, but he struggled with remarkable decision.

Ned, who was habitually soft of step and had entered the infirmary unnoticed even by his sister's sharp wits, found them engaged in this undignified contention.

‘For fuck’s sake, Hal—Harry—that’s my fucking _sister_ —stop it!’

‘Edward—it’s all _right_.  Soporifics can do that.   _Illis non enim sciunt quid faciunt_ , you know.’

‘Dirty fucking—’

‘Ned—’

‘A man’s sister is his sister, Nell.  And a nun—’

‘Canoness.’

‘Same difference.’

The boy— _Hal—Harry_ —was rolling and whingeing.  Eleanor steadied and soothed him and looked up at her brother over the bed.

‘So, his name is Henry.  Care to tell me more?’

The bell tolled for mass.  Eleanor shook her head. ‘I have a dispensation—if there’s an emergency.  And this is an _emergency._ ’

‘All right. The blacksmith says your device will be ready before Compline tonight.  I’ll ride back for it.’

‘Good. We’ll operate tomorrow. Now, draw up that joint-stool, sit down here and bloody well tell me, before I wring your scrawny neck.’

He told her. He told her who the youth was. He told her how the battle had seemed at first to go well for King Henry’s forces. How, after he thought the arrow storm was done, the prince had raised his visor, just for a moment—

‘It’s a tyro mistake.  Classic stuff. He’s only eighteen, poor sod. When there’s sweat pouring into your eyes, tumult all around you, and you can only see though a little metal grille—it’s the most tempting thing in the world—just to get your bearings, just long enough to say _Pater Noster qui es in caelis_ and, whump.’  Ned gestured to indicate the progress of the stray arrow.

‘I tried to get him somewhere safe, behind the lines, you know.  But our luck had turned.  People —said—nah, it’s daft.’

‘What?’

‘That the Percys had—a—sorcerer—working for them.’

‘That windbag Glendower? Joan—she’s from the marches—has told me about him. He’s no more a sorcerer than the prioress’s puppydog.  All piss and hot air.’

Harry moaned.  Brother and sister both reached to stroke his brow, their hands bumping in mid-air.  They frowned in annoyance, then grinned identical grins.

‘Not the Welshman,’ Ned continued.  ‘He didn’t show.  This one is from the Wirral.  Sir—Bertie—something? And he has a—mistress—she _is_ Welsh—Morgan—’

Eleanor made the sign of the cross and shook her head firmly. ‘All is as God disposes, Ned. The Devil is abroad, and men do his work, but they do it with the tools and capacities of men, not magic—’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I wish you’d told me last night. We’re all in a lot of danger. But panic and despair won’t help.’

Joan appeared in the doorway, signing urgently. Eleanor replied, Joan signed some more, and then Eleanor shook her head in puzzlement.

‘What’s she saying, sis?’

‘We seem to have another fugitive from the battle on our hands—they found him blundering about the outhouses, roaring drunk. He’d got into the buttery while everyone was at mass.  Another knight.  His name’s—it can’t be, that’s not a real name.’  She signed again, and Joan repeated the sign, somewhat testily.  ‘Well, she says it is. Sir John Dropstick.’

Ned’s hands were upturned for a shrug.  He brought them together and let his head fall slowly into them, then to his knees. ‘Oh fuck,’ he groaned, indistinctly. ‘That’s it.  Finished.  We’re done for.  We’re all fucking well fucking dead.’

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in roughly the same alternate universe as [this one.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/histories_ficathon_vi/works/926672)
> 
> [Dulle Griet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulle_Griet) is anachronistic here: the gun was built in the first half of the fifteenth century, but not early enough for Poins to have encountered it in the mercenary career that I've imagined for him here.
> 
> Eleanor plans to undertake much the same sort of [maxillo-facial surgery](http://www.medievalists.net/2013/05/20/prince-hals-head-wound-cause-and-effect/) historically performed on Prince Henry by John Bradmore after the Battle of Shrewsbury.
> 
> Historically, Prince Henry was aged 16 at the battle of Shrewsbury; Shakespeare portrays him as somewhat older. The 18 of this fic is a compromise between the two.


End file.
